Flying Saucers and Science: A Scientist Investigates the Mysteries of UFOs

Praise for Stanton Friedman and his work:

The most explosive book yet on UFOs.

—Star Magazine

Friedman operates mostly as a scientist, carefully weighing all evidence before coming to a conclusion.

—Library Journal

This book will delight those who can’t get enough of crashed saucers and government cover-ups.

—Booklist

Can they get here from there? If so, have they already arrived? And what is the evidence? Nuclear physicist Stanton T. Friedman, a 50-year veteran scientific ufologist known for his impeccable research, shares his findings with us. A must-have for anyone who wants to know the truth with the documented evidence to back it up.

—Kathleen Marden, coauthor of Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience

Friedman has been involved in UFO research for more than a quarter century. During that time, he has struggled tirelessly against a vast amount of resistance on almost every level. He has uncovered hoaxes, discovered hidden truths, and has fought arrogant bureaucrats and fallacy-happy UFO debunkers, not to mention other researchers eager to discredit him for their own ends. He is one of the few truly professional UFO researchers.

—Whitley Strieber, New York Times best-selling author of Communion and 2012: The War for Souls

FLYING SAUCERS AND SCIENCE

A SCIENTIST INVESTIGATES THE

MYSTERIES OF UFOs:

INTERSTELLAR TRAVEL, CRASHES,

AND

GOVERNMENT COVER-UPS

By

Stanton T. Friedman, MSc.

Copyright © 2008 by Stanton T. Friedman

All rights reserved under the Pan-American and International Copyright Conventions. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without written permission from the publisher, The Career Press.

Quoted material from Whatever Happened to Flying Saucers? by Arthur C. Clarke, reprinted with permssion from The Saturday Evening Post magazine. Copyright 1971 Saturday Evening Post Society.

Brass Tacks section of ANALOG from December 1975, page 172, used with permission from Ben Bova.

Park, Robert L., Welcome to Planet Earth, used with permission from the New York Academy of Sciences, www.nyas.org.

Images from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram used with permission from the Photograph Collection, Special Collections at the University of Texas at Arlington Library.

FLYING SAUCERS AND SCIENCE

EDITED BY KARA REYNOLDS

TYPESET BY EILEEN DOW MUNSON

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Friedman, Stanton T.

Flying saucers and science : a scientist investigates the mysteries of UFOs : interstellar travel, crashes, and government cover-ups / by Stanton T. Friedman.

       p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-60163-011-7

     1. Unidentified flying objects. 2. Interstellar travel. I. Title.

TL789.F6793 2008

001.942--dc22

2008006291

This book is dedicated to

my loving wife,

Marilyn,

who has so patiently—for decades—tolerated my fixation on getting to the truth about flying saucers.

She has put up with late-night radio programs and phone calls, my long trips away from home, visits from a wide variety of media people, and a huge accumulation of (hopefully) relevant papers, books, and videos.

I only hope it has been worth the effort.

Acknowledgments

I wish to gratefully acknowledge the Mutual UFO Network for sponsoring my numerous appearances at its annual symposia, forcing me to prepare papers for inclusion in the symposia proceedings.

Thanks also to The Fund for UFO Research, which provided some research grants to assist in my field investigations related to Roswell and my visits to a number of document archives.

To Robert Bigelow for a generous research grant for Roswell and MJ-12-related research.

To the producers of a large number of radio and TV programs who have given me a platform.

To the hundreds of colleges who have allowed me to stimulate campus communities with lectures and class visits.

To my literary agent, John White, who has successfully pursued publishers.

To all those brave witnesses who have been willing to speak out despite the antipathy from nasty, noisy negativists.

Contents

Forewords by Dr. Edgar Mitchell, ScD, and Dr. Bruce Maccabee, PhD

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Case for the ET Origin of Flying Saucers

Chapter 2: You Can Get Here From There

Chapter 3: From Where Do They Come?

Chapter 4: The Cosmic Watergate

Chapter 5: The Cult of SETI

Chapter 6: The UFO Why Questions

Chapter 7: Science, Science Fiction, and UFOs

Chapter 8: UFOs and Public Opinion

Chapter 9: Update on Crashed Saucers at Roswell

Chapter 10: The Press and Flying Saucers

Chapter 11: The Operation Majestic 12 Documents

Conclusion: What Does It Matter?

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Forewords by Dr. Edgar Mitchell, ScD, and Dr. Bruce Maccabee, PhD

The fact of an extraterrestrial presence on and around Earth for at least half of the 20th century has been increasingly accepted in the United States and much of the Western world in recent times, albeit slowly. This has happened in spite of continuous efforts of political, military, and cultural authorities in the United States and other nations to obscure and even deny that fact through the release of distorted and false information pertaining to sightings and other reports.

Discovery that we are not alone in the universe must rank, for us humans, as one of the most portentous events in our entire history. Only in the time of generations now living has our own technology progressed to the point that we can venture off our planet, and also create the means necessary to view the vastness of the cosmos as no generations before us have done.

Debate about the propriety, morality, and even legality of such official denial and cover-up of these events in a free and open society will likely continue for some decades. Justifications involving national security, potential use of the knowledge by military opponents, public unrest, and even fear of public uprisings may be invoked by those seeking to defend these policies. The fact that the now-famous Roswell UFO crash occurred shortly after World War II, the most widespread and disastrous war in history, and following the first use of nuclear weaponry in war—weaponry that was initially tested at the nearby White Sands Proving Grounds—provided ample grounds for military concerns.

Whether these were valid concerns has yet to be determined. However, in the context of the cold war era, it is understandable that the military and intelligence communities might have been concerned that the aliens were hostile, yet were unable to do anything about their presence, and thus would not want the public to know. (The famous radio program War of the Worlds had been broadcast on the East Coast of the United States only a few years earlier, causing widespread panic.) Additionally, in light of the recovery of an alien craft at Roswell, the military and intelligence communities would not want America’s Cold War enemies to know we had gained access to an advanced technology that might be used by the United States to deliver weapons. So there may have been sound reasons for enforcing a cloak of secrecy, denial, and misdirection about UFOs.

But if so, one must wonder why the policy continues today, when the public is well informed and largely accepting of the subject.

Irrespective of how one views the pros and cons of 60 years of official denial of alien presence on and around our planet, the truth has slowly seeped out into public awareness and acceptance, due in part to many of the inane stories and contradictions offered by official sources. Mostly, however, discovery of the truth has been due to the dedication, thoroughness, and capabilities of a handful of investigators such as Stanton Friedman.

A 40-year veteran in the pursuit of truth about UFOs, Stan Friedman has used his knowledge of science, his training as a nuclear physicist, and his penchant for digging persistently to discover the facts, sifted from an excess of fantasy and misinformation, to become a major figure in the effort to disclose the presence and activities of our alien visitors. His work and his writing in this field deserve the very highest acclaim.

—Edgar Mitchell, ScD, Captain USN (ret.)

Lunar Module Pilot, Apollo 14

Sixth man on the moon

UFO believers are 99 44/100% kooks.

The editor of the technical journal Applied Optics wrote that opinion in a letter to me about publishing my short article on the then-internationally famous New Zealand sightings of December 1978. Despite his reservations about UFO believers, he did allow publication, even though my article claimed that the light that had been seen was unidentified. He also allowed publication of a second article by scientists who disputed my claim, and then a third article—by me—that rebutted the second article. There are some more details of this following, but the complete story and the published articles are available at http://brumac.8k.com/NEW_ZEALAND/NZSB.html.

The publication of three short articles discussing one of the New Zealand sightings is one of the few times—or perhaps the only time—that a specific UFO case has been discussed in a point-counterpoint manner in the refereed scientific literature. The reluctance to publish discussions of UFO reports and the previously stated opinion of the editor of Applied Optics illustrate the low opinion that the general scientific community (but not all scientists) has of UFO sightings and ufology (the study and analysis of UFO sightings and associated phenomena) in general.

The tendency of scientists to reject UFO reports as being spurious sightings by untrained observers, [claiming that sightings are] all explainable as misidentifications, hoaxes, or delusions, goes way back to the beginning, in late June of 1947, when experienced pilot Kenneth Arnold, who had about 4,000 hours of flying time, reported seeing many unidentified semicircular-shaped objects fly past Mt. Rainier and Mt. Adams in the state of Washington. They had no recognizable aircraft features (no wings, no vertical stabilizers, no engines). He said they flew with a wobbling or skipping motion, comparable to that of a spinning disc skipping over the water. (A newspaperman converted the description of the flight dynamics to a description of the objects themselves and called them flying saucers. The name stuck, even though Arnold didn’t say they looked like saucers.) Within a few weeks of Arnold’s report, which was published throughout the United States, there were hundreds of other reports of strange objects flying through the sky. The U.S. Army Air Force began collecting reports and publicly stated that they aren’t ours. Air Force spokesmen admitted that they didn’t know what was causing the sightings. Over the next few years the Air Force claimed that most of the sightings could be explained as prosaic phenomena (weather phenomena, birds, misidentified airplanes, stars or planets, hoaxes, and so on), and the ones that couldn’t be explained simply didn’t have enough information to allow identification of the phenomena. The Air Force also said to the general public (and to the scientific community), Don’t worry, we are working on it, and we haven’t found anything yet. They added that there seemed to be no evidence of a threat from flying saucers.

The scientific community considered the sightings from two points of view: theoretical and experimental. There was no theory that could explain the generally reported characteristics of saucers: typically circular or semicircular in shape, ability to alternately fly at high speed or hover, little or no evidence of propulsion mechanisms, and silent or nearly silent when hovering or traveling. (Note: all high-speed flight we humans have achieved depends upon the rapid combustion of fuel. Combustion makes noise, as in the cylinders of a piston engine, in the turbine of a jet, or in the combustor of a rocket. Balloon-borne craft can be very quiet, but they also don’t move very fast.) Some of the Air Force scientists and engineers working on the newest propulsion devices initially considered the possibility that the unexplainable saucers might be atomic-powered Soviet flying machines that were based on advanced designs developed by the Germans in WWII. They soon dropped this idea because they were certain that the Soviets would not allow secret, advanced devices to fly over the United States, where they might crash and their secrets could be discovered. With advanced Soviet devices ruled out, that meant that the saucer reports resulted from misidentifications, hoaxes, or delusions. There was no theoretical reason to allow for a fourth possibility: flying craft made elsewhere (in other words, not from Earth). The chief theoretical reason against this possibility was essentially that the distances between Earth and other hypothetical planets are so great that they can’t get here from there. The theory was that it would take too much time and energy to build a fleet of flying saucers (or motherships analogous to aircraft carriers) to travel from some other star system to ours. (In more recent years, Stanton Friedman has disputed this theoretical objection to extraterrestrial saucers in his lectures, and now he does it in this book.)

In the early years of UFO sightings (1947 to 1952 and beyond) the scientific community also relied upon the opinions or claims of those few scientists who actually studied and proposed explanations for individual sightings. These scientists took the experimental/theoretical approach: Imagine each sighting to be a non-repeatable experiment resulting in observational data, and try to find a phenomenon theoretically capable of explaining the data. This approach would have turned up unexplainable sightings, except for one factor: anti-saucer bias by the mainstream scientists. This bias arose from the theory discussed previously (they can’t get here from there). Hence these mainstream scientists often force-fit an explanation onto a sighting. They would claim that they had explained a sighting, without actually proving the explanation was valid. For example, one theory of the Kenneth Arnold sighting is that he saw a mountaintop mirage. It is fine and scientific to consider theory such as this to explain a sighting, but once the theory has been generated it is necessary to determine exactly what part or parts of a sighting the theory might explain. In this case, mountaintop mirages are associated with mountains. Because Arnold reported seeing the saucers near Mt. Rainier, this could be considered a (weak) point of agreement between the theory and the observation. However, further study of this theory shows no agreement with other aspects of the observation: mountaintop mirages are above the mountaintops, but Arnold claimed the saucers were below the top of Mt. Rainier (he saw them silhouetted against the side of the mountain); mirages have no lateral motion—they stay above the tops of the mountains—but Arnold saw the saucers traveling from north to south at a high speed (he even measured the speed at about 1,700 mph!); mirages are typically dim (inverted) images of the mountaintops, but Arnold said he saw bright sunlight reflections from the objects. So the mountaintop mirage theory has one point of weak agreement and three points of strong disagreement. It must be rejected. Failure to agree with the observation did not, however, prevent this explanation from being published. Some people probably read the explanation and decided that Arnold saw a mirage.

One scientist who claimed to have explained the Arnold sighting, Dr. Donald Menzel (who is discussed in this book), proposed that Arnold saw blasts of billowing snow from the sides of Mt. Rainier. The wind would carry the snow southward from Mt. Rainier, thus explaining the lateral motion. However, it would look white, like snow, not like shiny semicircular metal objects. Furthermore, the winds blowing the snow would have been detected by Arnold as he flew past (south of) Mt. Rainier while heading east. Yet Arnold reported calm conditions—no wind. Reject the blasts of snow. Menzel also proposed wave clouds and water drops on the windshield, two more explanations that failed. These theoretical explanations, and others, were offered for Arnold’s sighting without careful checks against the sighting details. Not one of the proposed explanations provided a satisfactory fit to the observational data.

Because Menzel and others suggested so many potential explanations, the general scientific community seemed to conclude that Arnold’s sighting had been explained. But this conclusion was arrived at without independent analysis of the data by other scientists. Apparently scientists felt that, because there was no theoretical reason to believe saucers could be anything other than ordinary phenomena, there was also no reason to question the explanations proposed by Menzel and others throughout the years since 1947. The scientific community has also failed to question the explanations offered for other sightings by other scientists (and non-scientists).

Another factor during the early years (1947–1960) that has led the scientific community to avoid the study of UFO sightings is that the Air Force kept control of the best sighting data by military observers that involved multiple witnesses, radar, and so on. Civilian scientists were generally not sufficiently interested in the sightings to travel to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to view the sighting data, so few outside the military were aware of the best sightings. At the same time the Air Force was effectively covering up the data, it was also publicly claiming that, despite their best efforts, the investigations [Projects Sign (1948), Grudge (1949–1951), and Blue Book (1952–1969)] were finding no evidence of unknown technology. Thus, in the early years, a tradition was established that saucer sightings are not a result of unknown science or technology, and can all be explained. It is this tradition that explains why there have been few UFO sightings (or perhaps only one—New Zealand), discussed in the refereed literature. It is this tradition that led the editor of Applied Optics to make the 99 44/100 % comment. And it is within this tradition that the editor of Science Magazine was acting when, in 1974, he rejected my first attempt at publishing a scientific article about a UFO sighting.

In 1967 it was legitimate to openly discuss UFOs because there had been many publicly reported sightings in the middle 1960s, which caused Congress to order the Air Force to support an investigation independent of Project Blue Book. (This turned out to be the two-year-long Condon Study at the University of Colorado.) During that year, in its September 15 issue, Science Magazine published an article by William Markowitz with the title The Physics and Metaphysics of Unidentified Flying Objects. This article was entirely consistent with the tradition. Markowitz argued that, because the reported objects do things that seem to violate some laws of physics and engineering as we know them, and because he was unaware of any convincing evidence in the form of sightings or hardware, no flying saucer was an extraterrestrial craft. Three years later (November 6, 1970), Science published another article consistent with the tradition, entitled Status Inconsistency Theory and Flying Saucer Sightings. In this article Donald Warren argued that people who have inconsistencies in their lives (such as a person with a sixth-grade education being the chief executive officer of a large corporation, or a former bank executive who is now a janitor), may feel excessive stress, leading to alienation from society, and so may be more likely to report seeing a flying saucer. Science has also published letters to the editor responding to the Markowitz article, many of them critical of Markowitz, so I felt that it might be possible to get a pro-UFO article into Science.

After the flap of UFO sightings in the fall of 1973 I decided to make my move. I submitted an article with the title, Why Might a Scientist Decide to Investigate UFOs? This article pointed out that some sightings seemed unexplainable, and then offered as an example the details of a multiple-witness, long-duration sighting of a strange rocket-shaped object that hovered above a mountain near the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. Two weeks later I received a letter from the editor advising me that he already had enough articles to last for six months, so if I wanted to get the article published I should try some other journal. Of course, I would have been willing to wait a year to get an article published in Science, so I took this as an immediate and final rejection. The tradition had won out.

Five years later, when I submitted my first letter to the editor of Applied Optics, the tradition was still in force. This first letter had nothing to do with the New Zealand sightings—they had not yet occurred. Instead, this letter was in response to a tradition-based article published in the November 1 issue of Applied Optics, in which the authors suggested that some unexplainable UFO sightings were actually flying swarms of glowing insects. They were supposedly glowing because of electrical discharges from their pointed body parts (legs, antennae) as the swarm flew through a strong electrical field that can occur under some calm atmospheric conditions (not just during thunderstorms). My letter disputed this Buggy UFO Hypothesis (BUFOH). Several months later the editor said he would publish my letter if I shortened it. However, during that time the New Zealand sightings occurred, and I had carried out an on-site investigation, had performed an optical analysis of the color movie film of the lights, and had managed to obtain a quantitative estimate of the power that was radiated by one of the lights. I had also tried to get my estimate published in Nature Magazine, because Nature had carried a report on the sightings soon after they occurred. However, Nature had rejected it—not because there was something wrong with the analysis, but because the editor of Nature had expected a more comprehensive study. Because my power estimate was, therefore, both timely and unpublished, I proposed to the editor of Applied Optics that, instead of publishing my rebuttal of the BUFOH, he might consider publishing my optical analysis and power estimate as an indirect rebuttal of the BUFOH (certainly the light recorded on the New Zealand movie film was not a swarm of glowing insects!). He agreed, but I believe it was not because he was taking an unbiased, scientific attitude toward UFO sightings, but rather that he felt he owed me one because he had delayed so long in publishing my letter about the BUFOH. Subsequently, he published a rebuttal to my letter, and then, very reluctantly, my response to the rebuttal.

The point here is that, even under the best of conditions, mainstream scientists accept the tradition. In this book Stanton Friedman shows why scientists should reject the tradition. Instead, they should look for themselves at some of the most puzzling sightings in the last 60-plus years. He shows that the arguments often made to support the tradition, such as there are no very interesting sightings that aren’t explainable, and no unexplainable sightings that are really interesting (paraphrase of a comment by Carl Sagan), or all UFO witnesses are poor observers (paraphrase of Edward Condon), are just plain wrong. In the open literature (as opposed to secret government closed literature, about which we can only guess) there are sighting reports that combine multiple witnesses (two or more) with long duration (many seconds to minutes or longer) and relatively large angular size so shape details can be seen (1/3 of the full moon size or larger). There are some that include radar (ground, airborne, or both), some that include physical effects on machines (car stopping, effects on aircraft controls), some that include landing traces, and many that include photos or film or videos. (The New Zealand sighting is the only one known to this author that combines multiple witnesses with air and ground radar, as well as color movie film and audiotape recordings made during the sightings.)

Stan, having given hundreds of lectures, literally throughout the world, is very familiar with the questions people ask, and he has answered many of them in this book. You will find out why he thinks the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), which attempts to detect radio or light signals from other civilizations, is silly and likely to fail even if there are ET civilizations out there. You will find out why he believes there is a government cover-up or Cosmic Watergate. You will find out where scientists have gone wrong in predicting physics-based limitations on technological advances (for example, predicting that manned flight in a heavier-than-air vehicle was impossible three months before it was accomplished by the Wright brothers). You will learn about the disconnect between ufology and science fiction writers (who fully accept the tradition), and, considering the ufologically negative aspects of the tradition, you may be surprised to learn what public opinion polls show. You will also find discussions of the most up-to-date information on the Roswell crash, the Betty and Barney Hill abduction, and the infamous MJ-12 documents.

This book should help you break through the tradition barrier, as I did years ago. After studying this subject for more than 40 years I have to agree with Stan: AFCs are real (where AFC = Alien Flying Craft). We are not alone!

—Dr. Bruce Maccabee, PhD

Introduction

It was way back in 1958 that I casually ordered a book called The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects by Air Force Captain Edward J. Ruppelt. (I needed one more book for my order from a mail-order discount book supplier to save paying shipping costs.) The book had been marked down from $2.95 to $1, which would have been the cost of shipping anyway, if I hadn’t ordered it. Thus, it was free. Ruppelt, the ad said, had been in charge of Project Blue Book. At the time I was working as a young nuclear physicist on nuclear airplanes for General Electric near Cincinnati, and figured Ruppelt ought to know what he was talking about. The United States Air Force (USAF) was cosponsor of our program with the old Atomic Energy Commission. I thought, maybe if UFOs were real, they were using nuclear power for their craft. Might be worth a laugh, anyway. I read a lot back then.

The book intrigued me, and, with hindsight, I can say it was a very lucky first UFO book. (Many I have since discovered aren’t worth the paper on which they are printed.) I read a bunch more, and discovered a very important volume called Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14 at the University of California, Berkeley library. It really caught me up short (as I will describe fully in Chapter 2). I then joined two serious groups: The National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, and the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (both long gone), to get their newsletters and read a lot more. I talked with my colleagues as I went from one cancelled government-sponsored classified advanced research and development program to the next, never dreaming that I would be writing my own magnum opus in 2008.

I gave my first lecture about flying saucers in 1967 in the living room of a woman who was a technician at Westinghouse Astronuclear Laboratory near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We were designing, building, and testing nuclear rocket engines for possible use as upper stages in deep-space propulsion systems. Her book review club was covering Frank Edwards’s book, Flying Saucers Serious Business,